My friend Emma Lee-Potter continues the story of her mission to restore a dilapidated French farmhouse. Will she eventually get to spend a whole night there - let alone tuck herself away to write the bestseller? It's slowly beginning to look more likely ...
Slowly, slowly, the ugly duckling is turning into a swan. Three years after I made the most impetuous decision of my life and bought a ramshackle farmhouse in the south of France without really meaning to, the place is starting to look like home. There’s no kitchen, no bathroom and we haven’t even slept a night there yet, but it feels like ours at last.
The house (I have to call it that because it still doesn’t have a name) has a stunning south-facing terrace with views to the Roche Colombe, a glass front door which lets the Provençal light flood into the hall, and new windows that perfectly set off the pale, elegant stone.
Upstairs, the builders have worked wonders, ripping out the hardwood partitions that divided many of the rooms and replacing the dodgy floors and ceilings. I only wish I’d been there when one of them stopped everyone in their tracks by walking jauntily across the joists like the tightrope walker he used to be.
The adjoining barn has been utterly transformed too.
Once full of discarded car doors, rusty bits of tractor and several lifetimes of junk, it now boasts two floors and a new roof which cost nearly as much as the house itself.
The vast first floor is so breathtaking that we’re all arguing about what it should be used for. It’s the size of a tennis court and I’m secretly harbouring plans to make it my office. If I can’t write a bestseller there I never will.
When we stayed nearby last summer, my teenage children threw themselves wholeheartedly into the renovation.
In the blistering heat, 18-year-old Lottie painted the huge gates that open into the courtyard (very typical in this part of France) a tasteful shade of pale grey. She liked the colour so much she persuaded the builders to paint the beams inside the house the same hue.
Meanwhile Ned, 15, helped to demolish an entire first-floor ceiling. It wasn’t the ideal convalescence for someone who’d recently broken his collar bone in three places, but he was adamant that he wanted to do his bit.
We became loyal customers at the builders’ merchants in the nearest town and drove back and forth to Crest to hire equipment, buy timber and inspect paint charts. Lottie and Ned are both studying French at school and stunned their teachers on their return by quoting an impressive new vocabulary, mainly comprising words like skip, gravel and digger. How useful these terms will prove in their impending exams I’m not sure.
On sunny days everyone would break for lunch under the plane tree. Generations of farmers have sat in exactly the same place and put the world to rights over a glass or two of Pastis, and we’re proudly carrying on the tradition.
When I first bought the house I used to wake in the early hours and worry about it. But these days I reckon it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.
It may be a while yet before it’s finished but from acrobatic builders to long lunches in the sun, the house with no name has given us so many memories already. I can’t wait to see Lottie scooting elegantly down the drive on a pale blue Vespa, Ned doing crazy bike stunts in the field and all of us sipping Sauvignon in the shade of our plane tree.
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